PARIS Some 20 cars have been torched and four people detained in a second night of violence in suburbs west of Paris. France's interior minister said Sunday that the incidents overnight targeted the town of Elancourt. Police union official said on BFM television that about 50 assailants were involved, some firing weapons and a gasoline bomb at police. The night before, about 250 people hurling projectiles clashed with police firing tear gas in the nearby town of Trappes in apparent protest over the enforcement of France's ban on Islamic face veils. Five people were injured and six detained in the

The Al-Azhar authorities stated in 1997 that cutting female sexual organs -- even partially -- has no foundation in Islam, is medically harmful, and should not be carried out. "Everyone pretends like it never happened." While overshadowed apparently by the general civil conflict over the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) regime in Egypt, the spreading problem of female genital mutilation (FGM) has recently shaken the land of the Nile. Yet the mass upsurge against the tyrannical fundamentalism of the MB is related, however obscurely, to the protests against FGM. Late in June, British media reported that Suhair Al-Ba'ta, an Egyptian girl aged...

There's this strange sense in the zeitgeist that robotic warfare is somehow disreputable. If you read the news, hardly a day goes past without some deprecatory reference to the use of drones by the United States in its ongoing war against al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. The sense that there is something amiss with the deployment of drones in combat permeates popular media. Indeed, thinking off the top of my head, I can't think of a single example in recent popular culture where the deployment of a drone has been positively portrayed. I believe that this is madness -- the sort...

*Luftwaffe pilot Lt Franz Stigler refused to shoot down near-destroyed Allied bomber *Instead he guided stricken pilot Lt Charlie Brown to safety *A phone call led to a tearful reunion of the two World War II veterans The lone Allied bomber was a sitting duck. Holed all over by flak and bullets and down to a single good engine, it struggled simply to stay in the air over Germany, let alone make it the 300 miles back to England.

The European Union’s new ban on areas located beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines will do nothing to advance peace talks, Finance Minister Yair Lapid wrote on Friday. In fact, said Lapid in an op-ed which appeared in the New York Times, the ban will simply encourage terrorist groups. “As the American secretary of state, John Kerry, leads new efforts to reinvigorate peace talks among Israelis and Palestinians, one of the obstacles—if not the main one—is the presence of extremist Palestinians and their supporters,” he wrote. … According to Lapid, “The world shouldn’t make things easier for extremists. It’s challenging enough...

The Romeikes, a German family granted legal asylum in the United States by a U.S. immigration judge in 2010, will petition the Supreme Court to hear its case to be granted permanent legal status in the country. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany after their family was vigorously prosecuted with steep fines, threats of loss of custody of their children, and imprisonment—all for homeschooling. Homeschooling is largely illegal in Germany. Though the family was granted political asylum in the United States, the Obama administration appealed that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and that Board decided in favor of...

Originally published by the Gatestone Institute. Taxi rapes are rarely reported; apparently because the politically incorrect crimes are not deemed to be newsworthy. BBC radio host Sam Mason, a single mother, was fired after she called a taxi company and requested a â€śnon-Asianâ€ť driver to take her 14-year-old daughter to her grandparentsâ€™ home; preferably a female driver. The operator refused, and said, â€śWe would class that as being racist.â€ť Mason responded, â€śItâ€™s not your 14-year-old girl.â€ť A BBC spokesman said, â€ś[Mason's] comments were completely unacceptableÂ…she will no longer be working for the BBC.â€ť Great Britain is in the throes of...

Nearly a dozen “long-lost, rarely seen” Soviet films and scores of screenplays that were never produced about the persecution of Jews during World War II have been revived and are featured in “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe,” a new book released by Rutgers University Press this week. “Those films have been pretty much just erased from history, really,” said the book’s author, Olga Gershenson, an associate professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an interview with RIA Novosti. Gershenson said that “basically half of all the Holocaust victims, nearly three...

Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has said outsiders cannot tell him where his country begins or ends in reaction to new EU guidelines on settlements. Speaking in a 40-second-long TV clip in Hebrew on Tuesday (16 July), he noted: “I will not let anybody harm Israelis living in Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Jerusalem … We will not accept any external dictates regarding borders.”He added the EU should focus on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program and Syria's civil war instead of the Arab-Israeli conflict. …

President Obama's nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, is a late convert to the pro-Israel cause, but today she promised to fiercely advocate for the Jewish state, including fighting to help Israel obtain a nonpermanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Power, a close confidante of President Barack Obama and a former top White House official, received a warm welcome today at her confirmation hearing to replace Susan Rice as the U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. But senators pressed Power on her previous statements that caused a rift between her and elements of the pro-Israel...

Pro-Morsi demonstration at Al-Aqsa Mosque: U.S., France, Britain to be destroyed, Rome to be conquered There were also calls for the restoration of the caliphate. The caliphate is supposed to be the unitary state in which every Muslim is a citizen. In Sunni theology, only the caliph is authorized to wage offensive jihad -- which is one reason (but not the only reason) why in the current absence of a caliph all jihads are justified by endless grievance-mongering. All jihad is currently defensive, so the grievances have to be retailed. This crowd also repeated the genocidal and anti-Semitic "Khaybar" war...

German industry is largely in favor of a minimum wage, a new survey shows. Yet despite the opposition Social Democrats putting it high on their agenda, managers still do not trust the party with the economy. A survey of German managers conducted for the Handelsblatt business newspaper showed 57 percent wanted a mandatory minimum wage in the country. Those in service industries were the most in favor, with 61 percent saying they wanted a minimum wage. An hourly rate of €8.88 ($11.60) was considered suitable, the managers told pollsters from Forsa who carried out the survey. This is more than...

Turkey's parliament has amended an internal armed forces' regulation long relied on by the country's once-powerful generals as grounds for intervening in politics, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported Saturday, in a move that further strips the military of its political influence. The military has wielded huge political power in the country, overthrowing four governments between 1960 and 1997 and issuing a warning against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted government as recently as 2007. The generals have in the past pointed to an internal military regulation that stipulated the army's duty as watching over and protecting the Turkish republic, to...

The US Embassy in Egypt denied Saturday that US naval vessels near Egypt's shores are sent in preparation for military action. A top Marine Corps general said Thursday that two US marine vessels approached Egypt's Red Sea shore, raising concerns in the Egyptian media about an imminent military move. "We deny false claims in the Egyptian press that US naval ships are in the vicinity of the Arabian Peninsula and the Suez Canal to militarily invade Egypt," read a statement issued on the US embassy's website. The statement went on to say that the United States regularly deploys forces near...

Germany on Friday called for the release of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi amid mounting tensions between supporters and opponents over his overthrow. "We call for an end to the restrictions on Mr Morsi's whereabouts," a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters. Morsi is currently being held in a "safe place, for his safety" and has not yet been charged with anything, according to the Egyptian foreign ministry, but military and judicial sources say he may eventually face charges. The German ministry spokesman said a "trusted institution" such as the International Committee of the Red Cross should be granted access to...

General Dynamics to beat out Germany for Saudi tank deal-report (Reuters) - U.S. defence firm General Dynamics is in talks to deliver battle tanks to Saudi Arabia, beating out German rival Krauss-Maffei Wegmann for the lucrative deal, a German newspaper reported. Handelsblatt daily cited industry sources as saying on Friday that a deal for Saudi Arabia to buy M1 Abrams tanks from General Dynamics was already in sight. General Dynamics and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann were not immediately available for comment. There has been speculation for months that Saudi Arabia could order more than 200 Leopard 2 tanks from Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, though...

In June, an EU commission put forth aÂ banking resolution proposalÂ giving itself powers in which the ability to shut down banks would be centralised in the European Commission. Brussels would have the clout to overrule the bankâ€™s home country and use funds from a central pot. Specifically, the commission proposed the resolution authority to â€śbe equipped with a single bank resolution fundâ€ť. The fund would have the power to borrow from markets, using the â€śassets of euro area banksâ€ť as a guarantee and backstop. Nazi Enabling Acts The proposal was presented on Tuesday by Michel Barnier, EU commissioner for internal market...

Europe’s debt-crisis strategy is near collapse. The long-awaited recovery has failed to take wing. Debt ratios across southern Europe are rising at an accelerating pace. Political consent for extreme austerity is breaking down in almost every EMU crisis state. And now the US Federal Reserve has inflicted a full-blown credit shock for good measure. None of Euroland’s key actors seems willing to admit that the current strategy is untenable. They hope to paper over the cracks until the German elections in September, as if that is going to make any difference. A leaked report from the European Commission confirms that...

John Kerry speaks on his latest trip to Israel. Photo: Israel Hayom video.This week the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister blamed mass protests in his country on the Â‘Jewish Diaspora.Â’ Millions of Egyptians took to the streets demanding the ousting of President Morsi who was subsequently removed from power by the Egyptian military. Jordan blocked 254 news websites and Iran was discovered to be importing missile-grade ore from Germany and France. The world was also reminded of the savagery that is SyriaÂ’s civil war when a video of rebels decapitating a Catholic priest with a kitchen knife went viral.And John...

In an interview to be published in this week’s issue of Spiegel, American intelligence agency whistleblower Edward Snowden criticizes the methods and power of the National Security Agency. Snowden said the NSA people are “in bed together with the Germans.” He added that the NSA's “Foreign Affairs Directorate” is responsible for partnerships with other countries. The partnerships are organized in a way that authorities in other countries can “insulate their political leaders from the backlash” in the event it becomes public “how grievously they're violating global privacy.” … Spiegel reporting also indicates that cooperation between the NSA and Germany’s foreign...

Britain took another step towards an in/out referendum on its membership of the EU on Friday (5 July) after MPs unanimously backed a bill guaranteeing a vote by the end of 2017. … In a boisterous debate dominated by Conservative euroskeptics, Foreign Secretary William Hague endorsed the bill which was, he said, “about giving people the power to decide one of the greatest questions facing Britain.” …

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon's effort to account for tens of thousands of Americans missing in action from foreign wars is so inept, mismanaged and wasteful that it risks descending from "dysfunction to total failure," according to an internal study suppressed by military officials. Largely beyond the public spotlight, the decades-old pursuit of bones and other MIA evidence is sluggish, often duplicative and subjected to too little scientific rigor, the report says. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the internal study after Freedom of Information Act requests for it by others were denied. The report paints a picture of...

Passengers leaning their head against the window will "hear" adverts "coming from inside the user's head", urging them to download the Sky Go app. The proposal involves using bone conduction technology, which is used in hearing aids, headphones and Google's Glass headset, to pass sound to the inner ear via vibrations through the skull.

Suddenly a handshake from David Cameron probably seems an awful lot more inviting. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy could become the next wealthy Frenchman to flee to Britain over his country’s looming tax hikes on the rich. Mr Sarkozy – who famously snubbed the Prime Minister’s attempt to shake his hand after Mr Cameron vetoed changes to the EU treaty in 2011 – is reportedly planning to move to London to set up a Ł800million investment fund. The 57-year-old, who was ousted from office last June, has amassed a fortune from Ł150,000-an-hour public speaking engagements and is now said to be...

World leaders weigh in after Egypt's army commander announces that president had been removed The Egyptian army's suspension of the constitution and removal of President Mohamed Morsi has drawn mixed responses from world leaders: European Union The EU has called for a rapid return to democracy in Egypt. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said: "I urge all sides to rapidly return to the democratic process, including the holding of free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections and the approval of a constitution, to be done in a fully inclusive manner, so as to permit the country to resume and...

July 4, 1940 — Churchill’s finest hour? DANIEL F. HARRINGTON On July 4, 1940, Winston Churchill stood before Parliament and delivered stunning news about the horrible events that had occurred the night before; events he himself put in motion. The new prime minister received his first standing ovation since assuming Britain’s highest post just two months before. The recognition brought tears to his eyes, though the news itself was sufficiently tragic to produce tears without the ovation. So what exactly did Churchill announce that fateful day? To understand what our English cousin did (Churchill was half-American by birth; his mother...

When Element Power announced on April 10 the closing of a deal to build wind turbines for Blackrock in Ireland, nothing was said about the more than 14,000 other wind turbines lying idle around the world. Nothing was said about Element’s recent termination of another deal to build 40 wind turbines over 4,000 acres on top of Black Lava Butte and Flat Top Mesa in California, citing in its “request to relinquish” that there were “insufficient wind resources” to make that project viable. Those 14,000 wind turbines lying idle in California’s Altamont Pass, Tehachapin, and San Gorgonio areas and elsewhere...

A German newspaper has expressed regret after publishing a cartoon that appeared to depict the state of Israel as a ravenous monster. Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung says the picture appeared Tuesday alongside two reviews of books about Israel. The caption suggested that the Jewish state was seen by its enemies as akin to Moloch—a monstrous deity from the Old Testament to whom followers sacrificed their children. …

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — German civilians working for the U.S. military are all but assured a pay raise that includes a one-time payout to be made about the same time American defense employees in the country are furloughed. The deal was agreed to Friday by negotiators representing the German workers and foreign militaries in the country, who employ about 22,000 local nationals, according to ver.di, the union representing the workers. According to a statement on the union’s website, the deal would see the workers’ pay increase 30 euros a month starting January 2014. In addition, they would get a one-time 500-euro...

Germany's banking system is one of the worst in the world, according to Paul Gambles, managing partner at advisory firm MBMG International, who told CNBC that Deutsche Bank is over-leveraged and is an accident waiting to happen. Responding to German retail sales data, which showed a surprise rise of 0.8 percent month-on-month in May, Gamble said that Germany was the key problem with the euro zone project. German exports to the rest of Europe ensure that it remains the profitable powerhouse of Europe, but that wealth is then transferred back to the struggling periphery through bailout agreements. "Germany is the...

BERLIN — IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting. The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored....

Trans-Atlantic relations plunged at the weekend as Berlin, Brussels and Paris all demanded that Washington account promptly and fully for new disclosures on the scale of the US National Security Agency’s spying on its European allies. As further details emerged of the huge reach of US electronic snooping on Europe, Berlin accused Washington of treating it like the Soviet Union, “like a cold war enemy”. … The reports of NSA snooping on Europe—and on Germany in particular—went well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying said to be focused on identifying suspected terrorists, extremists and organized criminals. Der Spiegel reported that...

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency can keep secret some of its records on Adolf Eichmann, the man known as the architect of the Nazi Holocaust, a court ruled Thursday. The Federal Administrative Court ruled that the intelligence agency was within its rights to black out passages from the files sought by a journalist attempting to shed light on whether West German authorities knew in the 1950s where Eichmann had fled after World War II. Thursday’s ruling followed a decision last year in which the court said the Federal Intelligence Service had to release some files it had previously kept secret. Israeli...

American POWS sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area. The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to...

PICTURE: German air force to bid 'Pharewell' to last F-4Fs Germany will retire its last operational McDonnell Douglas F-4F Phantom IIs on 29 June, with the veteran type's duties having been assumed by Eurofighter units. After almost 40 years of service, the final interceptors will be retired during a decommissioning event to be staged at the Luftwaffe's Wittmund air base. The final German examples are operated by the air force's JG 71 "Richthofen" squadron, which was also the first to begin flying the type, in March 1974. Delivered in 1973, its first F-4F, 37+01, received a special livery for the...

It’s always interesting to notice what the mainstream media emphasizes when reporting on a speech delivered by Barack Obama – and always even more interesting to notice what they choose not to bother questioning. Here’s ABC News on Obama’s speech last week at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: “Today President Obama will invoke two of the most memorable presidential speeches in modern history — Kennedy’s 1963 “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and Reagan’s 1987 “Tear down this wall” speech — both delivered here….The idea, White House officials say, is to tap into the energy and legacy of those great Cold...

Russian President Vladimir Putin cautioned the West on Friday against arming Syrian rebel forces, which he said included "terrorist" groups, and warned that a swift exit by President Bashar al-Assad risked creating a dangerous power vacuum. "If the United States ... recognizes one of the key Syrian opposition organizations, al-Nusra, as terrorist ... how can one deliver arms to those opposition members?" Putin told a panel with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Where will they end up? What role will they play?"

BEIRUT — Syrian rebels said Friday that newly arrived shipments of heavy weaponry could swing the momentum on the battlefield in their favor, after a shift in U.S. policy opened the door for others to send them arms. Weapons from the United States have not materialized since the White House announced last week it had authorized direct military support for the opposition, but the U.S. decision appears to have prompted other nations to increase assistance, with new deliveries including highly prized antitank and antiaircraft weaponry, according to Khalid Saleh, a spokesman for the main Syrian Opposition Coalition. Saleh declined to...

On Friday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer criticized President Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The speech was sparsely attended compared to the speech Obama had made at the same venue back in 2008 during his first presidential election campaign. And as part of the “All-Star Panel” Friday “Lightning Round” segment, Krauthammer won the privilege of posing the question to his colleagues on how to define the speech. “Obama gave a speech in Germany this week,” Krauthammer said. “Was it a) a stirring defense of the United States...

Barack Obama showed up again in Berlin. Sadly, 194,000 of the fawning devotees that cheered him like a rock star in 2008 chose to skip the 2013 encore. Nonetheless, directly out of the Brandenburg gate, the president commenced with injecting race and gender into the conversationwhen he said "Angela and I don't exactly look like previous German and American leaders." Obama then informed the audience, consigned by invitation to stand in the blistering heat listening to his blather, that Michelle, Malia, and Sasha, rather than endure his grueling speech, chose instead to experience the "beauty and the history of Berlin"...

While many waited for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to take the weight of the world markets on his Ivy League shoulders by declaring QE-4EVR-LOL!, the real economists at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco came up with a more detailed explanation for the poor, dragging, sluggish U.S. economy. What they found will astonish you. And yes, this is a true story. “[D]espite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received,” wrote Brian Lucking and Daniel Wilson in the FRBSF Economic Letter, “our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag [on U.S....

Hello Russia news Freepers. Tired of all this talk about companies hiding money offshore and not paying taxes? If there is one man who can make some noise about this, it won't be Obama. It'll be Putin. He already is taking over from British PM David Cameron who first made overtures to the fact that offshoring was unfair.

The question of whether Barack Obama’s second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality? Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project — ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government — more repulsive. Then came Wednesday’s pratfall in Berlin. There he vowed energetic measures against global warming...

I still remember the shock I felt when I was about half way through Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I was spending an undergraduate summer meandering slowly from Chicago to New Orleans when, in the middle of a passage about something else, I came across a glancing reference to France’s “captive king”. Stunned, I put the paperback down and stared round-eyed at my fellow Greyhound passengers.Until that moment, it had not properly hit me that the entire book, the most penetrating denunciation of revolutionary excess ever composed, had been written before the Terror started. As a piece of...

... Obama is set to lay out his vision for advancing toward a world free of nuclear weapons during a speech Wednesday at the historic Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A senior administration official says Mr. Obama will propose the United States and Russia cut their number of strategic nuclear warheads by up to one third below the level agreed to in a 2009 treaty. That pact, called the New START agreement, calls for the two countries to reduce their arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads by 2018.

In stark contrast to that of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama’s message on Wednesday was pure mush, another clichéd “citizens of the world” polemic with little substance. This was a speech big on platitudes and hopeless idealism, while containing much that was counter-productive for the world’s superpower. Ultimately it was little more than a laundry list of Obama’s favourite liberal pet causes, including cutting nuclear weapons, warning about climate change, putting an end to all wars, shutting Guantanamo, ending global poverty, and backing the European Project. It was a combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I'll get to Obama and Germany. There were two things he did in Germany. He had a press conference with Merkel and he had a speech, the Brandenburg Gate. If you remember, in 2008 Obama went over to Germany and he requested at that time to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, and the Germans, boy, they were under a lot of pressure because back then Obama was The Messiah. He was making a tour of Europe on his messianic pilgrimage as part of his campaign. He requested to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, and the Germans said...

Appearing on MSNBC´s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Wednesday, NBC´s chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd came up with a long list of excuses for President Obama´s poor speech performance in Berlin: "I want to give you a little context here....there was an attempt to shrink the crowd size....Maybe they would have gotten 25, 30, 40,000 people....President Obama feeds off a crowd very well." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Todd then grasped at other reasons for the lackluster event: "...you had that very distracting glass and you could just see that the President